It looks like Rick Perry is everything you’d want the Republican nominee to be.
That’s just as true, by the way, if you’re a Republican or a Democrat.
That’s because if Perry wins the nomination, the 2012 election should become the showdown we’ve all been awaiting.
Every four years they tell us that the coming election will be most important presidential race of our lifetimes. It almost never is, of course. But this race — whatever else it turns out to be — will almost certainly be the most defining presidential campaign since Reagan-Carter.
We need some definition. The national divide grows ever deeper and the cable chatter grows ever louder. It’s time we settle some things.
That’s where Perry comes in. After the Ames straw poll — a weird Iowa affair wherein candidates literally pay for their votes — the Republican race seems to be down to three candidates, matching Perry against Mitt Romney and Michele Bachmann.
What makes Perry stand out — besides his willingness to, say, call Social Security a Ponzi scheme — is that we’ve seen the other two.
I don’t know if there is such a thing as a Mitt Romney time, but this clearly isn’t it. He’s a character from one of those time-travel movies, except he comes from no recognizable era, past or future. What I mean is, he looks human, but he makes you wonder if you can trust your own eyes.
In any case, he’s not the anti- Obama figure that the moment demands. After all, he’s the author of Obomneycare, as T-Paw, in his brief showing, so aptly put it. He’s a (gasp!) semi-moderate in sheep’s clothing — that is, if sheep used to wear ties and now wear easy-fit jeans. The Wall Street Journal calls Romney weak. In The New York Times, conservative columnist Ross Douthat says Romney has been running for five years without a single original idea. (Douthat, who wants Chris Christie to run, is no fan of Perry either, calling him the Republican equivalent of a cross between Al Franken and Nancy Pelosi.)
Romney says he’s different from Perry, whom he calls a lifetime politician. Romney spent his formative years, of course, leveraging failing companies. Romney might have been a lifetime politician himself, though, if he hadn’t kept losing elections.
Then there is Bachmann, who won the Ames straw poll and who excites Tea Party voters and who is, in her words, the tip of the spear against Barack Obama. But she’s even less experienced than Obama and was ready to take the nation to default (while saying it wasn’t actually default) and likes to brag about her fight for the “Light Bulb Freedom of Choice Act.” No, really.
Perry, meanwhile, has been elected three times as governor of the nation’s second-biggest state, and, when it comes to appealing to Iowa social conservatives, he can match Bachmann prayer for public prayer.
Perry qualifies as a real anti- Obama, the Texan from Paint Creek who owns the Texas miracle economy (which may or may not quite be a miracle), who thinks the 10th Amendment means most New Deal and Great Society programs are more or less unconstitutional.
If you ask Obama’s advisers, who are worried enough about Obama’s 39 percent Gallup poll showing, they’ll say they worry more about Romney, who can run on his business background in a bad economy.
It’s no wonder they’d prefer Perry, who reminds me of the Ken Buck caricature that Michael Bennet beat in Colorado. But Perry is the real thing. He really doesn’t believe in the 17th Amendment. He really does think semi-official, evangelical-Christian prayer meetings are fine. He’d never call Tea Partyers dumb—es.
And Perry is the Texas governor who could make Republicans almost forget about George W. Bush. Perry isn’t responsible for two wars. He wasn’t in charge when the economy collapsed. If he sounds like Bush, he’s still a Texas A&M Aggie who didn’t go to Yale. He even jogs with a gun (no, I don’t know how either).
In fact, he’s so Texan he actually has suggested Texas might have to secede again some day— which is why I like to call him Rick “America Second” Perry.
But more to the point, in his campaign kickoff, Perry promised to make Washington “as inconsequential” in people’s lives as he could. It’s not just a campaign slogan. It’s at the heart of the national debate.
It could be a very consequential argument that elections have consequences. Of course, it’s early in the contest. We still have to see if Perry makes it to the showdown.
E-mail Mike Littwin at mlittwin@denverpost.com.
